Visible Learning Into Action

A Sneak Peek Into John Hattie's Soon To Be Released Book

Visible Learning Into Action: written by John Hattie, Debra Masters, Kate Birch; published by Routledge; with a release date of 25 October 2015.

John Hattie’s soon to be released book, Visible Learning Into Action, gives you a collection of living, breathing examples of how schools across Australia, USA, Hong Kong, UK, Sweden, New Zealand and Norway are using Hattie’s research findings to dramatically improve their students’ results.

In this new book, Visible Learning Into Action, Hattie, and his colleagues move beyond isolated teaching strategies and individual teachers to describe how school leaders have enacted whole-school improvement. While not as paradigm shifting as his first book, it offers you insight into how you can use Hattie’s insights across your entire school.

Discover how:

Keilor Views Primary School used Hattie’s idea of knowing thy impact to ensure that their students got at least one year’s worth of progress for one year’s worth of effort

Delve inside the book and you will find the stories of all sorts of schools using Hattie’s revelations to help their students do even better at school. You will find stories about:

Primary and secondary schools

Local schools and international schools

Private and public schools

Small schools and large schools

Schools that started with low student achievement

Schools where students were already above international benchmarks who wanted them to do even better

The key message is that it doesn’t matter where schools (or individual students) start from because we can all help our students to progress even further in the years ahead.

This doesn’t mean that there are not external factors that can help or hinder how well students do at school. It simply means you can help your students excel despite the things that you do not control.

The school’s stories give us concrete evidence that we can all improve, whether we work in low-performing school or a school that already exceeds international benchmarks.

Improvement is about helping each student to make significant progress from where they already are no matter where that may be. It is about preventing high-achieving students from coasting, as much as it about helping struggling students to pass.

Hattie’s view of school improvement is simple yet profound. He sees it as:

An opportunity to re-define its aspirations for students and to re-visit its basic beliefs and practices, evaluating them in light of their contribution to the intended student outcomes.John Hattie

The two things I love most about the book are that it:

Shows authentic ways that school leaders, teachers, and students can work together to achieve real progress for every child.

Doesn’t gloss over the challenges caused by tradition, fear, and deeply entrenched beliefs.

Visible Learning Into Action reveals how school leaders are using Hattie’s insights to initiate school-wide improvement – improvement that is focused on student results, and brought about through enhanced teaching practices and strong leadership.

4 Lessons for School Leaders from Visible Learning Into Action

Improving anything requires focus and a reprioritisation. Improving student results requires you to focus on and prioritise academic achievement. Research shows that a focus on performance reduces behaviour problems and improves the way students feel about themselves.

Assessment is critical. However, you must find ways to measure how much each child is progressing, rather than just determining what grade they deserve. Furthermore, you must feed this information back to teachers regularly so that they can use it to adjust their teaching.

Vision needs substance, and that substance must be expressed in terms of student results. Well-intentioned ideas such as we want to create a safe and nurturing learning community focus on the school rather than students. Motherhood statements such as we want all students to do their best present no risk of failure. However, Keilor Views Primary School’s desire for at least one year’s growth for one year’s work, is both challenging and student-centred.

School improvement cannot happen without teachers changing the way that they go about their work in their classrooms. Your role is to drive and support teachers to do this. You can drive change through setting ambitious, student-focused goals. You can also drive change through challenging the validity of existing practices, programs, and beliefs. You can support teachers by exposing them to research in practical ways, by providing them with evidence-based professional development, and through coaching them as they make changes in the classroom.

4 Lessons for Teachers from Visible Learning Into Action

School improvement cannot happen without you changing the way that you go about your work in their classrooms. You cannot make genuine enhancements until you take personal responsibility for improving the results of every single child in your class.

If you want to help students make real progress, you must determine where they are at, and then move them forward from there. After helping them improve, you must reassess your students in ways that allow you to discern how far they have progressed. You then adjust your teaching accordingly.

You must involve your students in their own improvement. You can do this by ensuring they know what you want them to achieve rather than just knowing what you want them to do. With your students armed with this insight, you can help them to self-monitor their learning and to adjust what they are doing when it isn’t helping them achieve their goals.

You can make a difference for more students by working collaboratively with colleagues. While it is tempting (and easy) to just do your own thing, and to adopt a ‘live and let live’ relationship with other staff in your school, this limits your impact to only the students that you directly teach. Most teachers joined our profession because they genuinely want to make a difference to the lives of students in their care. Collaboration lets you make a difference to a greater number of students.

If you are a principal, leader or teacher in a school and you want to help drive whole school-improvement, then Visible Learning Into Action is the book for you. You can pre-order it on Amazon.

Visible Learning Into Action

Other Books by John Hattie

About the Author

Shaun Killian is an experienced teacher and principal with a passion for helping students to excel. He believes that assisting teachers to adopt evidence-based education is the best way to make this happen. Shaun is committed to bringing you practical advice based on solid research.

You can connect with him on following channels:
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Comments

Thanks Shaun, really looking forward to this publication. I have just returned from the EduTech conference in Brisbane and was a little disappointed that the focus is on technology and having the right devices etc.. Technology is only a tool whereas evidence based teaching focusses on effective pedagogy. Technology is most effective in a pedagogical framework of Blended Learning. Effective Blended Learning should have components of direct/explicit instruction which Hattie has demonstrated through his research.

Thanks Shaun
I guess my question will always be :
How do we do the bit about challenging and re appraising progrms and teaching methods existent in schools which are entirely wrong for particular students ?
“We have the program.
We bought it . We’ll use it despite what the data says about a student” that is morally wrong!

I agree that mindset is dangerous. We need to get away from ‘be bought it we’ll keep using it’ and similar ‘i was told to it his way – it’s the new/best way’.

We need to see student as a challenge and approach it with a problem-solving mindset.

When I had a massive heart attack in 2012, I was on death’s door for several days. They started (as they should) with treatments and medicines that had the largest chance of success. But, when these first line responses didn’t work. No blamed the Dr, or the particular medicines. Rather it was a simple problem-solving challenge. We tried X, it didn’t work like we wanted it to, lets try y This kept going until they tried an experimental drug (Ivabradine), which gave me a few year’s reprieve from a heart transplant vs death scenario.

It was about philosophies, government policies or the Dr’s favourite approaches. Rather,

Thanks Shaun for this updated version – especially as it’s ahead of publication! Hopefully, you have a proof-copy?!! This helps people stay abreast of what’s current!
Thanks, also for your reviews of research and guides, these are current and easy to read, without all the jargon!
I’d be interested in your thoughts about the new directions for Naplan Online and the public demonstration site that was released late last year? The world of adaptive testing is almost upon us all?! Thanks again! Gail

I have used a combination of online and paper-based assessment for some time. My overall view is that there are inherent strengths and limitations to both. From a specifically NAPLAN point of view I see the strengths as being:

Turnaround time

Adaptive questioning

I am particularly impressed with adaptive questioning, which allows for far more accurate and finely graded assessment.

All that said, I haven’t seen the site yet but I’ll go and check it out now.